Nooooo!

Just logged in to LinkedIn and I see it's trying to turn itself into a Facebook clone.

This is so wrong. LinkedIn's strength is in NOT being Facebook or another casual social network. It's in being "serious", "businessy". It should (IMHO) be about expanding and managing your professional life. Not trying to beat Facebook on its own territory.

What happens when, suddenly, all these Chinese internet playas start going international?

Everyone is focussed on Google and Facebook and Twitter etc. But Asia is full of equivalents. At some point, one of them will achieve some mainstream success in the West. And then what?

GigaOm : Has Google given-up on social?

Facebook Mail : Facebook are absolutely rampant at this point.

This has got to hurt Google (and Microsoft). Leveraging Gmail is still Google's best hope of getting some kind of successful YASN off the ground. If FB can puncture that, then Google's fails in this area may start to look as tragic as Microsoft's floundering in mobile-land. (Basically Google would have to buy Twitter to stay in the game.)

Nice piece on the founder of Behance.

I really like Behance. Scott Belsky seems to have figured out the idea of a purposive YASN, and is doing some striking things with the community :

1) Selling his "Action Method" (a kind of Getting Things Done for creatives) around it

2) Organizing a conference.

3) Spinning off show-case sites.

4) Plugging into other professional networks like LinkedIn

etc.

Diaspora is bizarre, isn't it?

There are so many free-as-in-speech social networking software frameworks out there, what is one more? There is no way on earth that this is going to be even a blip on Facebook's radar.

Having said that, here's why this might be interesting.

If they get a combination of three things right :

a) the encryption / security / privacy
b) the user interface (so it's easy to install and administrate)
c) the hype, to get a critical mass of developers looking at it

If they do, then this could become an interesting basis of what you might call a "Virtual Private Intranet". A cheap way for a small distributed company to securely share profiles / discussions / news-tweets / files across the public internet.

Interestingly, although Facebook lets you create groups, it's not a great tool for say, people who like Dubstep,to set up a space where they can easily share their collections of mp3s with each other.

The trend is for social networks to get more private as they become more serious and more important. And there's plenty of room for growth in what you could call the "darknet" sector. (Criminals and cypherpunks have encrypted p2p sharing networks, but ordinary people and businesses still can't get them very easily.) So, if Diaspora
could make a cheap, easy-to-setup synthesis of Dropbox, LinkedIn and Twitter then they might have something interesting.

Of course, Ampify might get there first :-)

Sweet! LinkedIn just offered me a widget to embed my Behance portfolio.

I like this for two reasons :

1) I'm about to start taking my Behance / artistic portfolio more seriously. (More on that soon, over on Composing.) So it's handy for me personally.

2) LinkedIn and Behance are a good complement. LinkedIn still fascinates as an example of a successful YASN which isn't competing directly with Facebook. And Behance is another example of a purposive social utility which seeks to tie its portfolio hosting to more specific products and services for creative people.

I wonder if this signifies any deeper connection between the two companies, or whether it's just that the OpenSocial Behance widget became available for OpenSocial containers such as LinkedIn.

Dare Obasanjo on many social graphs. (Or what I used to call "typed links", but will probably start calling "tagged links")

I commented :

Surely it depends if Facebook succeed in getting people to tag (or classify) their social links.

There are ways to do this on FB, but it doesn't promote it much. But someone could write an app. which could somehow classify the relationship between two people based on things you tell it, even what your interests are etc. Then it could export that knowledge to widgets on the Engadget site.

Why not even make this a query option on the widget : "show me things that work-colleagues like", or "show me things that geek buddies like" or even "show me places that friends with higher than 85% similarity to me on the RockYou survey of "best things to do on my day off" like"

Scoble very interesting on Facebook :

First, you’ve gotta realize that in Facebook’s life it will go through at least seven phases. We are moving from phase four to phase five right now. In each phase change people have gotten pissed off

[snip]

Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph).

Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph.

Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the social graph.

Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph.

Mike Arrington:

Facebook is now well over twice the size of MySpace, according to recent worldwide Comscore data. And what's worse, MySpace is losing audience while Facebook absolutely hockey sticks: MySpace lost 2% of users in just one month, while Facebook grew by nearly 40 million members in February alone. MySpace currently has 124 million monthly unique visitors, compared to Facebook's 276 million.

Marc Andreesen joins EBay.

Hmmm. Is it just coincidence that Donahoe is talking about powerful communities when Andreessen’s current baby–Ning–is a social networking platform. Can you say exit strategy?

Admittedly, that eBay buying Ning idea is a leap, but crazier things–like eBay’s acquisition of Skype–have happened.

I must admit that I've warmed to the new Ning. It turns out to be pretty useful for putting a quick YASNS together. Buying it (and Andreesen) would definitely be a good move for EBay (if they can avoid wasting the opportunities the way they have Skype and Paypal)

LinkedIn starts an advertising network

BBC Radio becoming a YASN?

And here's Google's view of YASN trends.

Good piece from a couple of weeks ago about YASN business models.

I wonder how much it would cost to buy Tribe.net ?

If I was a magic money fairy - as opposed to an impoverished programmer - I'd try to find a way to merge Tribe with Behance and DesignOutpost

Behance has a great look and a nice angle of being not only a LinkedIn style directory, but also a kind Getting Things Done consultant, for the "Creative Class".

But it gives little sense of a community or real artistic "scene".

OTOH, Tribe has that in spades. Tribe used to be a fantastic place to have good discussions ... as it has lost attention to the other YASNS, the debates have died out a bit, sadly. But there's no doubt that members feel they're part of something ... a bohemian, creative, tolerant, underground, burner, new age, spiritual, sexually experimental movement.

DesignOutpost is a market for hiring creative people (graphic and sound-designers, web developers etc.) to work in a radically open way. Yet, its profiles are far behind those of Behance or Tribe.

In the talk of consolidation of the YASNS (particularly the dance of M$ and Yahoo, Facebook and MySpace) the motive is simply the lumpen aggregation of eyeballs for advertisers.

But the real as-yet-unlocked value of YASNS is to enable groups to *do* things together. Markets from DesignOutpost to Etsy to Rentacoder are providing one way for people to work together. The interesting thing about my fantasy merger is not the aggregation of eyeballs but the real (am I really, gonna use this word? OMFG! guess I am, take cover) synergy of the activities or communities.

A real social network and creative community which was also a good portfolio manager AND market could create value in a way unimagined by the advertising model of YASNS.

Update 2011 : Some more thoughts on YASN monetization.

Umair :

According to an interesting rumour making the rounds: Microsoft is to acquire Yahoo's search business as well as Facebook, and lock both down, to better take on Google. Microsoft is trying to shift from open to closed.

TechCrunch : The Social Network wars begin in earnest

Comcast buys Plaxo... bringing YASNS to television?

Tim Bray's predictions for 2008 ... worth reading.